BYRON’S EARLY SATIRIC VERSE
_Fugitive Pieces_, Byron’s first volume of verse, actually printed
in November, 1806, was almost immediately suppressed at the instance
of his elder friend and self-appointed mentor, Rev. J. T. Becher,
who somewhat prudishly expostulated with him on the sensuous tone
of certain passages. Of the thirty-eight separate poems which the
collection contains, eight, at least, may be classed as legitimate
satires. The arrangement of the different items is, however,
unsystematic and inconsistent. The lines _On a Change of Masters at a
Great Public School_, comprising a prejudiced and impulsive diatribe,
are followed by the _Epitaph on a Beloved Friend_, a sincere and
heartfelt elegy; while the conventionally sentimental _Lines to Mary,
On Receiving Her Picture_ are preceded and followed by satiric poems.
These unexpected juxtapositions, inexplicable even on the theory of
an adherence to chronology, suggest at once the curious way in which
Byron’s versatile and complex nature tended to show itself at various
times in moods apparently antithetical, permitting them often to
follow each other closely or even to exist at practically the same
moment. In his early book two characteristic moods, if not more, may
be recognized: the romantic, whether melancholy, sentimental, or
mysterious; and the satiric, whether savage or mocking. It is, of
course, only with the manifestations of the latter mood that we have
here to do.
The motives which urged Byron, at this early age, towards satire
arose chiefly from personal dislike, the wish to retaliate when some
one, by word or deed, had offended his vanity or his partialities.
His animosities, notoriously violent, were often, though not always,
hasty, irrational, and unjustified. His satire was occasioned by his
emotions, not by his reason, a fact which partly accounts for his
fondness for exaggeration and his incapacity for weighing evidence. As
to his choice of methods, it must be remembered that careful reading,
of a scope and diverseness remarkable for one of his years, had given
him a comprehensive acquaintance with the English poets, and notably
with Pope, for whom his preference began early and continued long.
From Pope, and from Pope’s literary descendant, Gifford, Byron derived
the models for much of his preliminary work in satire. He also knew
Canning and Mathias, Lady Hamilton, Mant, and E. S. Barrett, and, in
a different field, he was familiar with the lighter verse of Swift,
Prior, Anstey, the _Rolliad_, and the _Anti-Jacobin_. It was natural,
indeed almost inevitable, that these first exercises in satire should
reflect something of the style and manner of poems with which Byron had
an acquaintance and of which he had made a study.
The first printed satire of his composition was the poem entitled _On a
Change of Masters at a Great Public School_, dated from Harrow, July,
1805, when his period of residence there had almost closed. Dr. Drury,
Headmaster of Harrow, having resigned, Dr. Butler had been chosen to
fill the vacancy. Against Dr. Butler, Byron had no personal grievance;
but resenting an appointment which, passing over Dr. Drury’s son, Mark
Drury, had selected an utter stranger, the boy launched an invective
at a teacher whom he scarcely knew, and predicted the downfall of the
school under his administration. Characteristically enough he was
soon ready to avow his regret for his rash outburst. Referring to Dr.
Butler, he said in his Diary: “I treated him rebelliously, and have
been sorry ever since.” In the details of Byron’s conduct at this
time are exemplified several of his traits as a satirist: impetuous
judgment, energetic attack, and eventual repentance.
The use of the Latin type names, Probus and Pomposus, applied to Dr.
Drury and Dr. Butler, as well as a certain technical skill in the
management of the heroic couplet, indicates that Byron had perused Pope
to his own advantage. Already he had caught something of the tricks of
antithesis and repetition of which the elder poet had been so fond, and
he had derived from him the power of condensing acrimony into a single
pointed couplet. Such lines as:
“Of narrow brain, yet of a narrower soul,
Pomposus holds you in his harsh control;
Pomposus, by no social virtue sway’d,
With florid jargon, and with vain parade,”[52]
have a hint of the vigor and vehemence of Pope himself, while they
display, at the same time, the unfairness and exaggerated bitterness,
so rarely mitigated by good humor, which were to distinguish the longer
_English Bards_.
This poem, after all, was a mere scholastic experiment to be read
only by those in close touch with events at Harrow. _Fugitive Pieces_
contained also Byron’s earliest effort at political satire. An
_Impromptu_, unsigned, and derogatory to Fox, had appeared in the
_Morning Post_ for September 26, 1806, only a few months after the
death of the great Whig statesman, and the schoolboy, even then headed
toward liberalism, came to the Minister’s defence in a reply published
in the _Morning Chronicle_ in October of the same year. The opening
couplet:
“Oh, factious viper! whose envenomed tooth,
Would mangle still the dead, perverting truth,”
proved that he possessed, with Gifford, the singular faculty of
working himself, with very little cause, into a furious rage. When
once he had let his wrath master him, he was uncontrollable, and
he found satisfaction in nothing so much as in affixing scurrilous
epithets to those who had aroused him. Until he had studied the Italian
satirists, he was almost incapable of cool dissection of an enemy’s
faults or shortcomings, and even then he never acquired the virtue of
self-control.
This essay at political satire was not followed by other excursions
into politics, probably because of the poet’s temporary indifference to
the situation in England at the time. On January 15, 1809, in writing
his solicitor, Hanson, concerning his entrance into the House of Lords,
he said: “I cannot say that my opinion is strongly in favor of either
party.”[53] Not until after his return to England from his travels in
1811 and the beginning of his friendship with Moore, Hunt, and other
active Whigs, did his interest in politics revive and his pen become a
party weapon.
The last of the three classical satires in couplets to be found in
_Fugitive Pieces_ is _Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination_
(1806), composed at Cambridge. It opens with a burlesque sketch of
Magnus, a college tutor, but soon broadens into a general indictment
of pedantry and scholastic sycophancy. Byron himself had desired
to go to Oxford, and he never felt himself in sympathy with either
the instructors or the educational system of his Alma Mater. This
particular poem, however, is merely an outburst of boyish spleen,
remarkable for nothing except a kind of sauciness not unknown in the
university freshman.
_Fugitive Pieces_ had been privately printed, with the addition
of twelve poems, and with two poems omitted, as _Poems on Various
Occasions_ in January, 1807, and in the summer of the same year a new
collection, consisting partly of selections from the two previous
volumes and partly of hitherto unprinted work, was published under the
title _Hours of Idleness_. A final edition, called _Poems Original and
Translated_, appeared in 1808, comprising thirty-eight separate poems,
five of them new. Among the poems in these volumes, and other verses of
the same period, drawn from various sources and since gathered together
in Mr. Coleridge’s authoritative edition of Byron’s poetry, there are
several satires, many of them interesting in themselves and nearly all
illuminating in their relation to the author’s later production.
_Childish Recollections_ (1806),[54] a sentimental reverie, is satiric
in part, though it is devoted mostly to eulogies of Byron’s companions
at Harrow. In the couplet,
“Let keener bards delight in Satire’s sting,
My fancy soars not on Detraction’s wing,”
he disavows any satiric intent, but this does not prevent him from
indulging in some additional criticism of Dr. Butler. Regret for this
passage induced Byron to omit the entire poem from _Poems Original and
Translated_, and in ordering the excision he wrote Ridge: “As I am now
reconciled to Dr. Butler I cannot allow my satire to appear against
him.”
_Damoetas_, a short fragment of truculent characterization, may be a
morbid bit of self-portraiture, but is more probably a cynical sketch
of some acquaintance. The description is excessively bitter:--
“From every sense of shame and virtue wean’d,
In lies an adept, in deceit a fiend;--
Damoetas ran through all the maze of sin,
And found the goal, when others just begin.”
The poems so far mentioned as composed by Byron before 1809 have been
formal exercises in the manner of Pope, tentative efforts in the
_genre_ of which _English Bards_ was to be Byron’s best example. Even
in this early period, however, another phase of his satiric spirit
appears, which hints of the future _Don Juan_; it trifles in a lighter
vein, with less of invective and more of banter, and the style is lent
a humorous touch by the use of odd and uncommon rhymes. The half-genial
playfulness of these poems is decidedly different from the earnestness
and intensity of _Damoetas_, and makes them akin to the familiar verse
of Prior, Cowper, and Praed. One of the cleverer specimens is the
poem with the elaborate title _Lines to a Lady Who Presented to the
Author a Lock of Her Hair Braided with His Own, and Appointed a Night
in December to Meet Him in the Garden_, in which thirteen rhymes out
of twenty-two are double. These verses, printed first in _Fugitive
Pieces_, are possibly the earliest in which evidence may be found of
a sportive mood in Byron’s work. Their tone is both ironic and comic,
and possible romance is turned into something ridiculous by a satiric
use of realism. The poem is also one of the few examples of Byron’s
employment of octosyllabic couplets for satiric purposes.
_To Eliza_ (October 9, 1806), written to Elizabeth Pigot, Byron’s early
correspondent and confidante, contains some cynical observations on
marriage, with at least one line that might have fitted into _Don Juan_:
“Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.”
It is composed in stanzas made up of four anapestic lines. _Granta,
a Medley_, written October 28, 1806, in one of the bursts of rhyming
not uncommon with him at that period, treats, in a jocular fashion,
of college life at Cambridge. Its chief interest lies in some of its
peculiar rhymes, such as triangle-wrangle, historic use-hypothenuse,
before him-tore ’em, crude enough in themselves, but prophetic of
better skill to come, and in the fact that it uses the common quatrain
of four-stressed lines, with alternate rhymes, a measure seldom found
in Byron’s satire. _To the Sighing Strephon_, in a six-line stanza,
while occasionally serious, is actually the reflection of a frivolous
mood, and contains light satire. The trivial nature of these poems
as contrasted with the vehemence of some other of his early satires,
indicates that Byron’s satiric spirit even at that time was fickle and
changeable, dependent often on his environment and varying constantly
in response to alterations in his own temper. It is noticeable too that
he was experimenting with several metrical forms, and trying his hand
at extraordinary rhymes.
Byron’s path as an aspiring author was not always a smooth one, even
before his name became generally known. _Fugitive Pieces_ had been
harshly criticised by several of his acquaintances, and, as we have
seen, the objections of the hypercritical Becher had led to the
destruction of the entire edition. But the proud young lord was not
always tamely submissive to correction. In December, 1806, he wrote
in Hudibrastic couplets the verses _To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics_,
which express the same sort of injured pride and resentment that he
afterwards showed toward Jeffrey and the Edinburgh reviewers:
“Rail on, rail on, ye heartless crew!
My strains were never meant for you;
Remorseless rancour still reveal,
And damn the verse you cannot feel.”
Byron’s anger in these lines was directed apparently at certain ladies
of Southwell, the little town where most of his Harrow vacations were
spent; but though he mentioned one “portly female,” he had not yet
reached the point where he ventured to call his enemies by name. This
reserve, however, did not prevent him from breaking out in some caustic
personal satire, in the course of which he did not spare the characters
of the ladies in question. The same provocation led him to compose the
_Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country_ (1806), in heroic couplets, in
which he seems to pick three persons--“physician, parson, dame”--as
responsible for the adverse comment on _Fugitive Pieces_. In these
satires the occasional sharpness of single phrases does not conceal a
boyish timidity, which is evidence that Byron had not yet been stung
enough to make him realize or display his full power. Neither of the
poems was published during his lifetime, and they probably served only
to gratify his revenge in private among his friends.
Possibly the last, and certainly the most cynical, of these early
satires is the well-known _Inscription on the Monument of a
Newfoundland Dog_, dated by Byron from Newstead Abbey, October 30,
1808, though the animal did not die until November 18th. The twenty-six
lines of the poem are now carved on a monument at Newstead, with
an elaborate prose epitaph. Their misanthropy and savagery recall
the contempt which Swift expressed for humanity in such poems as
_The Beasts’ Confession_ and the _Lines on the Day of Judgment_. An
appropriate text for Byron’s verses might have been taken from Swift’s
letter to Pope, September 29, 1725: “I heartily hate and detest that
animal called man.” Doubtless Byron’s mood is due in part to an
affectation of cynicism which reappeared frequently throughout his
life; his hatred of mankind, if not actually assumed, was by no means
the deep-seated emotion that agitated Swift.
A retrospective survey of the material so far considered again fastens
our attention on the singular complexity of Byron’s satiric spirit.
In a body of work comparatively meagre in content, he had used both
invective and mockery, severity and humor. He had tried various
metrical forms, some dignified and some colloquial. There is less to
be said, however, for the intrinsic merit of the satires. No one of
them is brilliant, nor does any one suggest marked intellectual power.
The invective is too often mere indiscriminate ranting; the wit is, for
the most part, sophomoric; and the assumption of superiority in one so
young is, at times, exceedingly offensive. Here and there in single
lines and passages, there are indications of latent genius; but many
other young poets have shown as much.
These exercises, however, imitative and crude though they were, were
training him in style and giving him confidence. When his anger was
fully roused by the _Edinburgh Review_, he found himself prepared with
an instrument for his purposes. _English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers_,
with all its faults, is not the product of an amateur in satire, but of
a writer who, after much study of the methods of Pope and Gifford, has
learned how to express his wrath in virulent couplets.